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Saturday, 23 July 2011

Malfeitor - To Hell, Farewell (2011 Demo)

Okay, so I haven't been to active recently due to some strange circumstances, but now I'm getting my act together and am gonna start doing some new posts, so watch this space!

My first post is on a demo by a band I've been aware of for a while, so I thought it'd be a good place to start. Malfeitor are a Swedish death metal band, featuring members of other cult bands Excruciate, Exhumed, Mastication, Morpheus, Stigmata and more.

Malfeitor is made up of Benny Moberg on guitar, Mattias Parkkila on vocals and Janne Rudberg Björkenfjäll behind the kit. Benny and Mattias formed Malfeitor in 1990 and were active until 1995, when they then went onto other active projects, before reuniting in 2010. Janne joined them in 2011 and when onto to records this demo with them.

Their recent demo - To Hell, Farewell, is not you're typical swedeath demo. The band make use of both fast paced and slower sections, with evil low end growls and screeching guitar solos. The demo is made up of six tracks. The first track Beyond the Horrrorizon sets Malfeitor's stall out early, it's fast, evil but subtly different to most of the swe-death you hear at the moments. The screams of "die f-ing die!" shows that there might even be some black metal in their music as well. Second (and title) track To Hell, Farewell goes straight for the jugular with razor riffing and machine gun blastbeats. There is a certain element of black metal in the growls and a good almost symphonic atmosphere, but without being pompous. Third track Death, the dead and me build slowly with an almost doomy intro before launching back into a ferocious stride. Malfeitor seem to groove more on this song, but only for a short time, but it shows that they are not scared to vary their sound.
Fourth track Scenes from a slaughterhouse, is very much an old-school death metal song, including a screeching solo and the use of changing time signatures to build atmosphere. The fifth (aptly named track), And the sky turned to rage, is chaotic and finishes with a flurry of off-kilter riffs and blastbeats. Bonus track The Pain Collector, is the final ferocious bite of the cherry for Malfeitor on this demo. The deep vocals and never ending blastbeats added to the old-school solo gives the listener one more morsel of their brand of death metal, before the demo ends. It's the longest track on the demo and sees Malfeitor trying out a few extra sounds, to add texture to the track.

There may be a lot of bands peddling the death metal sound at the moment, but each one has a signature or something that stands them apart from other bands, and Malfeitor are no different. I'm excited about what is to come from them and will keep my eyes peeled, as should you!